The Right Fight: Jeff Colby
The 1986 Rainmaker looks like a fetish object, common among African peoples, intended to have special powers. A black handle supports a stick that leads to a comb; hanging from the center of the stick is a doll leg complete with a hinged knee joint. On the stick below are shards of colored glass; pieces of glass are also affixed at the base of the comb’s teeth. Colby carefully painted the teeth near the tips with narrow bands of white and black. If the bands suggest primitive magic, the leg is humorously incongruous, its fleshy plastic providing a mass-culture contrast with the various kinds of wood, its hinged knee perhaps hinting at an absurd rain dance.
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In Caution/Detour (1990) the junk surfaces overlap in a manner that stops the eye. A dark rusted circle and three metal rectangles of different textures (one is grating) are placed one above the other; the eye, rather than entering as it would with an illustionistic painting, is encouraged to comtemplate the particular qualities of each surface. In Escapement (1989) a rusty ridged plate dominates, but between two of the ridges Colby has placed what looks like a bright silver-colored hair roller whose smooth finish and neatly drilled holes contrast with the plate’s rust. Finished, clean, perfect objects, Colby seems to be saying, are no better than the junk we ignore and discard–there’s a beauty, even a similar beauty, in each.
Colby, 38, was born in New York City but grew up in Houston. His mother was an amateur artist, but he recalls that the biggest influence on his use of materials was his father: “Born in the Depression, he collects junk to this day. He’ll find a broom handle and adapt it to a shovel. I lived in a household where nothing was thrown away and there was a second chance for everything.” Now a Chicago native, Colby tested HIV positive in 1987, but he wasn’t aware that his subsequent ailments represented full-blown AIDS until about 1990, when his work underwent a profound shift. That year Colby made Fountain, whose title refers to Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymade of a urinal. Colby collected his urine and placed it in a glass vial; he recalls now that although he hadn’t fully and publicly acknowledged his AIDS at the time, including his own bodily fluid was a veiled reference to it.
These horizontal dark red stripes also made me think of the U.S. flag, a connection confirmed by Colby’s 1991 Flag Series. In the simplest of these, Lifeline, there’s a square of horizontal blood stripes at the center of a white rectangle. At the center of a separate piece, the 1994 Badge of Honor, are two overlapping backwards flags surrounded by a blood-stained border, and on either side are images of Reagan and Bush (the Reagan image appears to be from Bedtime for Bonzo). In the center of the flags is a short newspaper text suggesting that if we’d had a “president who wasn’t afraid of the epidemic,” things might be different today. Reagan, who was recently praised for announcing his own Alzheimer’s in order to raise public awareness of the disease, was notorious for his cowardly failure to ever speak the word “AIDS” in the eight years of his presidency.
Even simpler is the Penmanship Series (1994). Outside the context of this show these pieces might look like absolutely nothing–I doubt if they’d get Colby admitted to even a second-rate art school. But coming near the end of this retrospective, they are deeply affecting. Each is a simple pencil “drawing,” on paper awkwardly lined by hand with a ruler, of a child’s printing. The Alphabet alternates lines of the ABCs and “I have HIV, AIDS, CMB, KS, and MAI. I’m glad I know my alphabet so well.” In Staying Alive, he writes, “I fight to stay alive everyday.” In Friendship he names some of the friends who have helped him stay alive.
